August 18, 2009

Visual Studio Tools for STK9 is a new download on the ADN Download Center. This package adds a set of tools and utilities to Visual Studio, facilitating the development of STK Engine applications and STK plugins. The following capabilities are added to the Visual Studio IDE (C# and VB.Net): Toolbox controls, IntelliSense Code Snippets, and Add STK Reference context menu.

Toolbox controlsA new tab containing the STK Engine controls is added to the Visual Studio toolbox.

This removes the need to manually insert the controls into the toolbox using the Choose Items context menu. Also, this tab will remain available even after resetting your toolbox.

IntelliSense Code SnippetsAll the code snippets shipped in the STK 9 help system are now at your fingertips in the Visual Studio code editor! Select the Insert Snippet context menu and navigate to the [ AGI STK 9 ] entry.

There are 228 snippets available, organized in folders for easy navigation. Two languages are supported: VB.Net and C#. These snippets use the usual Visual Studio replacement capability for variables and literals, allowing you to substitute these variables and literals with the ones from your project on the fly. Here is a short video showing how to use these snippets:

Add STK Reference
A new [ Add STK Reference... ] menu is added to the Visual Studio Solution Explorer (and the other locations where you can add a reference):

This menu gives you an easy and quick way to insert a reference for the STK API libraries. It brings up the following dialog box:

Both the STK Engine & STK Plugins libraries are included (saving the inconvenience of having to locate the AGI assemblies in the COM tab from the regular References dialog). You can quickly select one or many STK assemblies to be added to your project.

Thanks for the feedback. I have just made available a new version of the Visual Studio tools that now supports installing the snippets in the Visual Studio Express editions. For more information see http://blogs.agi.com/agi/?p=1896